He almost fell off his chair and spilt his soup.

It was an intimate dinner hosted by an auction house in Hong Kong, and I found myself seated next to one of their Asia region senior executives. We got talking…he does art, I do luxury brands, and I casually suggested that an artist is a brand, or rather a luxury brand as their works tend to cost an arm and a leg, and in many cases the other arm and leg too. His reaction was instant – he choked and spluttered and his eyes screamed “Blasphemy”. This was too much commercialization to stomach, an unbearable loss of innocence, some final frontier of respect shattered. His auction house may be creating the market for these ‘art brands’, but he genuinely seemed to believe in the art-for-art’s-sake thesis, where self-possessed Van Gogh’s and Monet’s soldiered on relentlessly for their beliefs untouched by the crass hands of marketing, answering only to their muse and never to the market.

That may be a romantic ideal – and arguably necessary for the creation of great art – but I see an unmistakable parallel between the worlds of luxury brands and fine art today. And I see the same brand-building principles that helped create a global luxury brand frenzy now being applied lustily to create an art frenzy. Husain and Souza are to the art world what Vuitton and Gucci are to luxury brands. Subodh Gupta and TV Santosh have rapidly become sturdy brands in the league of Prada and Dior, and I don’t think that could have been accomplished without savvy marketing.

The same would be true for Zhang Xiaogang (the first contemporary Chinese artist to break the million dollar mark in auctions) and Yue Minjun in China. Or Damien Hirst in the UK, who has been called a “strategist in art marketing” by artprice.com. Or Jeff Koons in the US. Or Takahashi Murukami in Japan. (Chinese contemporary artists in particular have become hot brands – eleven of them made the top 20 best-selling artist list for the year July 2007 – June 2008.)

Let’s look at a couple of parallels.

Take the strategy of “democratization of luxury” which has proved extremely effective in growing the market at breakneck pace in the last two decades. The luxury industry took what was once an elite indulgence and transformed it into a mass-market phenomenon. This meant reaching out to new geographies, appealing to younger consumers, and most importantly, cutting across different income segments. Luxury not just for the rich and sophisticated, but for the likes of you and me. The same “democratization” strategy is now being used by the art industry. Art is no longer the preserve of a few wealthy and knowledgeable collectors, but is being marketed to and bought by a much broader base of consumers.

Or take the strategy of “logofication” – the practice of displaying logos and symbols very prominently on the brand’s products – which has been a major driver of the luxury brand cult in Asia. Louis Vuitton’s monogram, Chanel’s gilt chains, Botega Veneta’s criss-cross leather weave, Hermes Birkin’s distinctive shape – these have created an unmistakable visual language that is understood widely in Asia. The same holds true for the big brand artists of today. Subodh Gupta’s steel utensils and Yue Minjun’s laughing figures are the visual equivalent of logos. Hang a Zhang Xiaogang or a Husain on your walls and their symbolic language is likely to be recognized.

That raises a piquant question. Once established, luxury brands stay within the guardrails of their symbolic language – experimenting and evolving, no doubt, but never straying too far from their visual roots. Would the same hold true for an established artist? Would Yue Minjun be confined to his laughing faces? Would a work by Souza without his iconic symbols be valued just as highly by the market? Can Wang Guangyi leave his communist-era-poster-style paintings without seriously risking his market?

In other words, to what extent would an “art brand” behave like a luxury brand?